• DOI:10.1353/jcl.2015.0013
• Corpus ID: 170958564

G. Sampson, “A Chinese Phonological Enigma”: Four Comments

@article{Behr2015GS,
  title={G. Sampson, “A Chinese Phonological Enigma”: Four Comments},
  author={Wolfgang Behr},
  journal={Journal of Chinese Linguistics},
  year={2015},
  volume={43},
  pages={719 - 732}
}

• W. Behr
• Published 15 October 2015
• Linguistics
• Journal of Chinese Linguistics

1. OC SYLLABLE STRUCTURE One point made by Professor Sampson, which cannot be emphasized too much given the rampant back-projection of Standard Mandarin syllable structure onto Old Chinese realities in the literature, is that “homophony in the Old Chinese of three thousand years ago may not have been strikingly greater than in modern European languages.” (p.2.) This could be shown in a sober statistical manner, of course, by looking at textual occurrences of distinct syllables in a good OC reconstruction. Over the years, however, I have come to prefer to demonstrate that point in classes and lectures in a more intuitive way (Behr 2009), by using Y.R. Chao's (1892–1982) famous “Story of Mr. Sh eating a lion” ( Sh shì shí sh sh ). The story, first written in the 1930ies and later circulated in several versions, whose mildly funny contents need not to be detailed here, is formulated in a pseudo-classical wényán . In its most commonly cited version it contains a total of 94 characters, 31 of them different, which map onto four tonally distinct, but segmentally fully identical syllables pronounced <shi> in Modern Mandarin. However, even with such an artificially constructed piece of prose, intended to display a maximum of homophony in Modern Mandarin pronunciation while using the grammar of Classical Chinese, the text would have been fully intelligible in Old Chinese. If we transpose the